Collapse has West scrambling for plan

The apparent collapse of
Muammar Gaddafi
’s security forces is at least a partial victory for President
Nicolas Sarkozy
of France and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, who pushed the United Nations Security Council and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation alliance into vital military support for the rebels.

But few among the Western countries and their allies anticipated the speed of the demise of the Gaddafi government, and they are now scrambling during the August vacation and the holy month of Ramadan to put together a post-conflict plan for Libya. “How it ends is a determinant of what happens," a senior Western diplomat said. “There is a lot of back and forth about where to go."

To that end, France has called an urgent meeting of the so-called contact group for Libya next week in Paris, and Mr Sarkozy has invited Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister of the rebel government, to attend. The group was not supposed to meet until the UN General Assembly convened next month, but “there’s a lot to figure out", a senior Western diplomat said.

“The Libyan people need to be in charge. The NTC has to do it," the diplomat said, referring to the rebel government, the Transitional National Council. “It’s not for the international community, let alone NATO, to tell them what to do."

NATO has ruled out putting any of its troops on the ground in Libya, the NATO diplomat emphasised, though he conceded that individual countries might choose to do so, if invited. NATO itself, he said, would consider any role that the Libyan rebel leaders or the UN requested, but preferred not to have foreign troops on liberated Libyan territory.

Still, there was significant concern about reprisals and score settling, said François Heisbourg of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, a Defence Ministry adviser. “It’s less about individuals than about tribes, that this tribe was for Gaddafi and this one rebelled, and there were some signs of that in the Nafusah Mountains. That’s a major danger in humanitarian and political terms."

But Mr Heisbourg and the NATO diplomat said that the important and decisive fighting from western tribes, the Berbers and Misrasta, would help keep Libya together. Before unification of the state, the east was known as Cyrenaica and the west as Tripolitania. If Tripoli had been taken only by the long-suppressed eastern tribes, there would have been more potential for continuing civil war. But the capital was taken by western fighters. “This way it’s a national rebellion," Mr Heisbourg said.

There are strong elements of fragmentation and tribalism inside Libyan society, said Jean-Yves Moisseron, a regional expert at France’s Research Institute for Development. But at the same time, he said, “there is a large aspiration for modern, democratic development from Libyan civil society."

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There were two possibilities, Mr Moisseron said. Either the rebel leadership council managed to create a democratic process of state building in a Libya without normal state institutions. Or they failed to create an effective pact and Libyans reverted to their traditional tribal affiliations “as the last element of protection and identity".

Also important, he said, was a quick restoration of oil production and sales to finance development and rebuild the devastated economy, and crucial to that, he said, would be fostering stability so that many of the 2 million foreign workers who kept Libya functioning felt safe enough to return. “That requires a central state, and it is a big challenge for France and Europe to help restore the country’s infrastructure."

For France, “our focus now is how to help Libya, how to engage the machinery of the international community and the contact group to work out the best means to help", said Bernard Valero, the spokesman for French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, who is in Paris contacting his counterparts on the contact group.

“We’ve been very effective so far but now there’s a new context," Mr Valero said. “One issue, for example, is how and when to lift international sanctions on Libya. They will also need help above all in less sexy areas like reorganising the health system."

Contacts with Colonel Gaddafi or mediation were not a French concern, Mr Valero said, while another French official said that the colonel “had refused the exits that were offered him", and it was “the Libyans who will decide his fate".

After seven months of war, are the rebels ready to rule and what should the West do to help?

Italy is concerned about resuming its imports of Libyan oil and natural gas, one reason Rome was slower than some other countries to come out against Colonel Gaddafi.

Some 80 per cent of Libyan oil production went to Italy and France. Libya, in normal times Africa’s fourth-largest oil producer, has one of the continent’s largest oil reserves of some 44 billion barrels, more than Nigeria or Algeria.